Edith Dekyndt
It could be James on the beach. It could be. It could be very fresh and clear.

A meeting between James Ensor and Albert Einstein on the Belgian coast serves as the starting point for this solo exhibition by Edith Dekyndt, curated by Martin Germann. Only a few fragile photographs remain from that encounter—images that would later inspire Robert Wilson and Philip Glass in their opera Einstein on the Beach. At the center of the exhibition is Ensor’s Still Life with Chinoiseries, from MDD’s own collection. This work depicts imported objects—fabrics, ceramics, decorative elements—and embodies a Western perspective on distant lands.

Around Ensor’s work, Dekyndt assembles a series of objects: veils marked by traces of torn wallpaper, textiles, Chinese and Japanese ceramics, and various marine creatures. These elements refer, among other things, to mathematics, the passage of time, and the atomic disaster in Hiroshima. A central piece in the exhibition is a locally woven curtain, inspired by Japanese kimono patterns that, at the moment of the atomic explosion, were burned into the skin of Hiroshima’s victims. The textile, both soft and charred, evokes the moment when the atomic bomb reduced everything to ash.

Between Ensor and Einstein lies a subtle transition—from an old world shaped by colonial perspectives to a modern world in which science can bring about devastating destruction. Dekyndt’s exhibition makes this transition tangible, not through a concrete narrative, but through the presence of objects, the slowness of materials, and the silence they leave within us.